CNN reports that recently, Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, “used data from the social networking site to create a map of people’s friendships across the globe and to see how they related to geographical and political boundaries.” With a successful movie about its founder and some high-profile changes to the site, Facebook has repeatedly popped up in the news this year.

In many ways, the success of the site demonstrates humanity’s robust natural tendency, recreated interminably every day, to partake of unplanned, extempore interactions. Without oversight or a centrally-administered, hierarchical design, human beings connect with each other on their own terms, forging a valuable mesh of “friendships” across the globe.

Montesquieu wrote that “[c]ommerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices,” and, although Facebook isn’t — first and foremost — an avenue of commercial activity between its members, it does represent trade in ideas; it has been witness to the truth that to communicate across cultures doesn’t require ambassadors or diplomats, that, when left alone, people will band together and discover commonalities.

The marvel that is Facebook has also brought intellectual property issues to the fore, a result of the spotlight that the Facebook movie, The Social Network, cast on the high-stakes litigation generated by the company’s birth. It’s largely taken for granted today that intellectual property laws form an integral part of an American “free enterprise” system that takes care of those minds that give us, among other things, new inventions and creative works of literature.

But many of our tacit beliefs regarding IP law evaporate with just a modicum of scrutiny. Intellectual property rights like copyrights and patents don’t actually protect ideas, at least not unless we dissever the idea of protection from its ordinary meaning connoting defense. And, indeed, “national defense” makes a suitable analogy to intellectual property laws, both of the two actually amounting to offensive, violent pugnacity rather than legitimate safekeeping.

As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words, and just as it’s impossible to find a cogent way to designate imperialist U.S. foreign policy “defensive,” it’s similarly far-fetched to argue that intellectual property monopolies protect ideas. What those laws actually do, their concrete, tangible effects in everyday life and the marketplace, is lord over and dictate what other people are allowed to do with their physical property.

The state’s periphrastic phrasing of that process is “incentivizing and securing innovation,” but IP laws can’t touch or act directly on ideas, instead bearing on the kinds of things that really are susceptible to the designation “property.” Every copyright presides over what you can do with your paper and ink (or your hard drive, as the case may be), and every patent ordains the manners in which you can and can’t arrange the things that you own. The free, nonviolent marketplace — with its own natural incentives for creativity and ingenuity — is more than enough to protect ideas, which get along quite well without the forceful intrusions of the state’s intellectual property regime.

In today’s information economy, the grants of monopoly that the state gives through the unfair sanctuary of things like trade secrets and patents are colossal sources of anti-competitive power. Though most of us understand — at least superficially — the benefits derived from free and easy exchange in goods, it is frequently overlooked how important control of the discarnate world of information is.

Licensing agreements for intellectual property make up huge percentages of the commercial transactions that exist across national boundaries, allowing powerful corporate actors to engross important areas of the economy where IP is most prominent. These companies use their state-implemented bargaining power — in large part the result of IP — to strong-arm their overseas franchises into “grant-back” contracts.

These “agreements” vest in corporate megaliths the IP rights to anything new that might be discovered in the course of business. To be sure, intellectual property laws have provided succor to the multinationals that tower above our “flat world,” but they haven’t done anything like promoting inventiveness or diverse channels of information. Like so many companies, Facebook embodies the contradiction of the information economy, at once a source of malleable, ever-shifting networks and the smothering despotism of IP law.

Next time you see a tiny, encircled “c” or a patent number, reflect on how these things actually operate. Are ideas something that — even if we could — we would want to say that some people own? In practice, conveniently for the state’s ruling class, the ownership of ideas means the ownership of people and their personal effects, an Information Age slavery that’s hard to justify within the terms of “free enterprise.”

4 comments

My answer to the question in your final paragraph is, "Yes!" If I created/received an idea, it's mine. I get to decide how to release it into the world, and decent people will respect my wishes. Of course, I realize that open sourcing my idea is very likely the best way to steer money my direction, but if I want to charge for my idea, decent people will pay me to use it.

I will admit, however, that governments and corporations, which are government-created entities, tend to twist that ownership, into forms that no longer serve the actual individual creators. Hard problem. I don't know the answer. But I can't accept that the only answer is for all ideas to be instantly public domain.
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Merely having an idea does not make it instantly public domain. Once you act upon it though – once you "release it to the world", the only way you can keep others from acting on it is to use force (in the form of legislation in our current system) against them. And no one is saying that you can't charge for the use of your idea, but you certainly can't force others to pay for it either. Of course, the surest way to actually reap the rewards of your idea is to bring it to fruition yourself.

James R. R. Tolkien discovered that you don't have to force people to pay for your intellectual creations, because you can shame them into it. You might not get as much as you'd like, but you'll get paid. When _Lord of the Rings_ was first released into the U.S., murky copyright laws of the time failed to stop publisher Ace books from selling an unlicensed paperback edition. So Tolkien began a letter-writing campaign explaining the situation, and his licensed hard-back publisher quickly set up a deal with a different paperback publisher to release an authorized paper-back edition with a message from Tolkien, that "This paperback edition, and no other, is authorized by me and pays me royalties." Ace faced such a PR backlash that it was compelled to pay Tolkien a partial royalty, and the Ace editions soon disappeared from shelves.

And who's to say that someone else doesn't have the same, or very similar, idea around the same time you do? Should they be denied access to their idea simply because you may have filed paperwork sooner? Should they be robbed of their own intellectual "property" so that you can make higher profits from yours?